064 – Feel Like a Fraud? You’re Not Alone

We study. We work hard. We achieve high marks or a great job or something else just as rewarding… But something doesn’t feel quite right. This can’t be real. How did I fool so many people into thinking I deserved this?! They’re all going to realize that I’m a fraud.

Oy. That, unfortunately, is the script that many of us cycle through our minds and bodies when we reach a level of success that we don’t feel that we deserve… despite the effort we put in to achieve it.

Nowadays, it’s called “impostor syndrome.” Caltech Counseling Center says, “[it] can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.”

In this episode, we talk about why so many of us have underlying feelings of unworthiness and how we can combat those feelings. We discuss our own experiences to illuminate that this feeling is pervasive once one surpasses their “upper limit” issue in any area of life, really.